Restaurant of the week: Meigetsutou 明月堂

This is a teahouse with a modern wooden decor and a slight Zen feeling. A quite, simple place where you can easily allow yourself to revisit the Japanese colonial days. There are certainly other teahouses with a similar atmosphere elsewhere in Taipei, but in Tienmu, where Western-style restaurants reign, this is a rare find. Meigetsutou is a perfect place to feel mellow on a Sunday afternoon, sipping green tea, tasting Japanese sweets, and peering at the trees lining Chungcheng Rd.

The house's winter special is Strawberry Daifuku (草莓大福), which has a large strawberry put inside a soft, chewy and sticky rice pastry along with a sweet red-bean paste. So there is the taste of fresh fruit as well as the traditional taste of rice cakes. Daifuku means "great luck" in Japanese, perhaps because of the feeling of absolute satisfaction you get after eating it. If you are not a big fan of sweet red-bean paste, try the rou-yu (柔玉, meaning soft jade in Chinese) which is a jelly-like rice cake, partly transparent, and covered with fine peanut powder. It tastes light and soft and slightly sweet. You can also add a rich brown sugar syrup to make it more like a desert.

According to Yang Kuo-chun, manager of this 70-year-old house, Japanese sweets, (wakashi in Japanese) have just three basic ingredients: rice, beans and sugar, nothing more. And employing different methods, techniques and proportions, the store offers hundreds of different kinds of wakashi. "Generally, Japanese sweets are simple deserts. The tastes are purer and simpler than Western deserts, with differences so fine as to be easily neglected while eating," said Yang. In other words, gulping the desert down in a single bite is not recommended.

The same goes for the tea. Macha (green tea) is a must in this teahouse. Made from powder ground from fresh green tea leaves, the tea is placed in a large bowl and has a froth on top when hot water is added. The proper way to drink the tea is to use both hands to hold the bowl. There will be the taste of fresh grass along with the mellow taste of milk, if you so desire to add it. For clearer colored tea, boiled tea (煎茶) and rice tea (玄米茶) are also recommended. The former is a green tea brewed at a higher temperature and the latter are tea leaves roasted with brown rice.

In Chinese deserts, animal oil is an essential, just as butter plays a central role in Western deserts. But for Japanese deserts, there is never any oil. "So, it's a healthy desert," said Yang. The teahouse also offers light meals such as sausage rice with cream sauce and curry beef rice.